Serverless Computing

Motivation

In the backbone of our digital society, cloud computing enables an efficient, utility-like ecosystem of developing, composing, and providing software services. Responding to a trend to make cloud computing services more accessible, fine-grained, and affordable, serverless computing has gained rapid adoption in practice, and garnered much interest from industry and academia. However successful, serverless computing manifests today the opportunities and challenges of emerging technology: a rapidly growing field but scattered vision, plenty of new technologies but no coherent approach to design solutions from them, many simple applications but no impressive advanced solution, the emergence of a cloud continuum (resources from datacenters to the edge) but no clear path to leverage it efficiently, and overall much need but also much technical complexity. Several related but disjoint fields, notably software and systems engineering, parallel and distributed systems, and system and performance analysis and modeling, aim to address these opportunities and challenges. Excellent collaboration between these fields in the next decade will be critical in establishing serverless computing as a viable technology. The purpose of this Dagstuhl Seminar is to bring together researchers, developers, and practitioners across disciplines in serverless computing, to develop a vision and detailed answers to the timely and relevant, open challenges related to the following topics: design decisions for serverless systems, platforms, and ecosystems, software engineering of serverless solutions, applications and domain requirements for serverless computing, evaluation of serverless solutions, and beyond (privacy, cyber-physical systems, etc.) We will integrate diverse views through this interdisciplinary approach and synthesize a shared vision for the next decade of serverless computing.

The goal of the seminar is to combine the views of a diverse and high-quality group of researchers spanning three disciplines: (1) software engineering, (2) parallel and distributed systems, and (3) performance engineering.

This Dagstuhl Seminar will be a catalyst. Attendees will discuss the open challenges and opportunities of serverless computing for the next decade, with a focus on at least the following crucial aspects and questions:

• Envision serverless systems and applications in the next decade. How to leverage the freedom from operational concerns? How to overcome the challenge and enjoy the benefits of fine granularity?
• How to properly engineer serverless software and systems? What are the emerging architectural patterns for serverless systems and applications? How to test and debug serverless systems and applications?
• How to characterize, model, and analyze serverless systems and applications? How to understand the diverse serverless workloads?
• How to manage the resources used in serverless operations? How to schedule and orchestrate in this environment? How to manage specific application classes, such as computer vision, enterprise workflows, HPC, DevOps?
• How to deploy and manage the full lifecycle of serverless applications? How to add ML-capabilities to feedback loops? How to break through the operational silos?
• How to support privacy, security, dependability, and other desirable operational properties for serverless applications and systems?
• Beyond computer systems, how to consider serverless systems and applications from a holistic, cyber-physical perspective?